The 2013 construction season for the Highway 101 bypass around Willits will conclude Oct. 18, the CalTrans Project Engineer Geoffrey Wright told the Willits City Council on Wednesday night. After Oct. 18, the project activity turns to monitoring the site to ensure the project meets its regulatory requirements for sediment runoff.

Wright said the project would wrap up all work within and alongside the creeks by Oct. 15 as required by regulation. He also said the night time transfer of fill from the south end of the project to the northern areas along Main Street had concluded for this season. The last wickdrain was installed Tuesday and the crews are finishing tying them into the drainage collection system.

Sufficient fill has been placed in key areas along the project to allow the required settling to occur during the winter months. In some areas the ground has already settled 1.5 feet under the pressure of the fill, with the maximum settlement estimated at about 2 feet, says Wright. The main focus during this construction season was to pile the fill to the finished height only in key areas, with the remaining about 800,000 cubic yards of dirt to be brought onto the site in the coming years. The ground needs about five months to settle sufficiently in these areas to allow work to continue. The plan was to let the settlement occur through the dormant winter season, says Wright, and allow construction to start in these areas next spring.

Some of the erosion control plantings have already sprouted. CalTrans Project Manager Mauricio Serrano said the project learned from the early rains and have taken this into account to improve the containment. CalTrans personnel were on site before, during and after the rains to monitor water quality compliance.

The project is now considered 30 percent complete, based on amount spent. Serrano and Wright estimated, barring unforeseen problems, cars could be driving on the bypass at the end of the summer of 2016.

Bids are scheduled to be opened on the mitigation portion of the project valued at $12.7 million on October 22. This was delayed by about a month for CalTrans to update the bid specification to incorporate changes based on comments from the regulatory agencies. An addendum to the specification was posted on Oct. 8.

The Sherwood Road intersection modification, which is linked to the bypass project, Serrano says will not be constructed until after the bypass opens for traffic to minimize traffic delays on Main Street. A team has been put together to begin the environmental and design preliminaries, says Serrano.